Will Bangladesh Ever Have a Future?

Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- To an Indian who grew up in the 1970s
and ‘80s, the sights of Dhaka, Bangladesh, seem to belong to a
past that Indian metropolises have mostly outgrown: exuberantly
battered buses, unpainted buildings, pavement book vendors with
faded posters of Rabindranath Tagore and Karl Marx as well as
the Rolling Stones, and pitch darkness on the unlit streets and
squares where rural migrants congregate in the evenings. The
countryside still feels closer here than in Kolkata or Mumbai.

In recent years, Bangladeshis have suffered the brutality
of security forces and massive environmental destruction. For
months now, the news from the world’s seventh-most-populous
country has been dominated by the fractiousness of the country’s
main leaders, the trial of men suspected of war crimes during
Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971, and the slavery-like
conditions of the country’s garment industry.

I arrived in Dhaka during one of the many recent strikes
called by the opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist
Party, against the ruling Awami League. The shutdowns, imposed
through force, seemed economically ruinous, damaging small
businesses the most; they resolved nothing. At first glance,
Bangladesh seemed, like many countries in its neighborhood, to
be struggling to find a way forward.

Irreconcilable Differences

Shackled by irreconcilable differences between political
personalities, the country offers yet another instance of a
fledgling democracy undermined by an undemocratic winner-takes-all attitude among its leaders. Bangladesh does have its
innovators, such as Muhammed Yunus, the pioneer of microcredit.
The banking system seems more responsive to the poor majority
than in it does India. Bangladesh also does better than its much
richer neighbor in almost all indicators of the United Nations’
Human Development Index.

But the benefits of trade liberalization -- and, in
general, Bangladesh’s integration into the global economy --
have been more limited than previously expected. Certainly, the
country’s economic modernization, which seems necessary to pull
tens of millions out of destitution, seems to be proceeding much
too slowly.

India is building a security fence on its border with
Bangladesh, ostensibly to keep out Bangladeshi immigrants whose
presence provides fodder to Indian demagogues. Meanwhile, a
weakened state has ceded, often opportunistically, its
responsibility to mitigate poverty and improve social
infrastructure to such nonstate actors as aid organizations,
corporations, security companies, consultants, and various
domestic and international nongovernmental organizations.
Bangladesh is one of the most NGO-ized countries in the world.

What happens next? Can Bangladesh join the modern world
with its weakened governance, dysfunctional political system and
uneven economic growth? An absorbing new book, “Boundaries
Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh-India
Border,” seeks some answers in Bangladesh’s earliest attempt at
modernization.

The author, a Bangladesh-born social anthropologist named
Delwar Hussain, describes the strange aftermath of the Khonighat
Limestone Mining Project. Situated near the Bangladeshi district
of Sylhet and the Indian state of Meghalaya, Khonighat was one
of the spectacular projects of national modernization that every
postcolonial country once boasted of. India, for instance, had
the Soviet-built Bhilai township -- designed, as one early
resident, the poet and essayist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, wrote,
“by a pencil stub and a six-inch plastic ruler.”

The grids were no accident. They spoke of the
rationalization and bureaucratization -- two crucial aspects of
modernity -- that were supposed to weaken the hold of religion
and custom. The worship of older authorities was to be discarded
in a projected future full of plentiful modern goods and
pleasures. In the postcolonial imagination of progress, projects
such as big dams, factories and roads were expected to bring the
backward masses out of the rural hinterlands and propel them
into first-world prosperity.

Main Patron

Many of the new citizens of Pakistan, and then Bangladesh
after 1971, eagerly participated in these public works, largely
because employees were offered, as Hussain writes, “progress,
status and prestige” through a range of welfare provisions:
skills training, set wages, fixed working hours, health and
safety regulations, pensions. The state, in turn, enjoyed its
greatest legitimacy as the main patron of economic development.

But state-led projects such as Khonighat mostly helped
people who were within its ambit; the majority of the country’s
population remained trapped in poverty. Khonighat was closed
down in 1993 after it became cheaper to import limestone from an
economically liberalized India, and the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund put greater pressure on Bangladesh
to shut down its state-owned enterprises.

With its rusting machinery, unused cranes and half-torn
railway tracks, Khonighat is now a ruin -- of the kind that, in
Walter Benjamin’s vision, piles up as the storm of progress
blows through the world. Meanwhile, the adjacent village of
Borapani, which has become the center of an unorganized and
semi-illicit coal mining industry, showcases the new forms of
progress in many globalized economies.

Feeding the demands of Bangladesh’s coal-fired factories,
the cashiered laborers of Khonighat have transformed themselves
into traders. This impromptu and unusual elite is made more
diverse by people previously relegated to the margins by
Khonighat’s top-down modernization project, such as women and
transgender hijras, who have achieved prominence by fulfilling
local needs, economic as well as sexual: The cover photo on
“Boundaries Undermined,” of a hand with brightly painted nails
and a steel bracelet engraved with the word “Nike” grasping a
coal sack, hints at the new ideas of work and pleasure that have
emerged in the era of liberalization.

Subsidiary Professions

Religious practices suppressed by the secular ethos of
Khonighat have also emerged. The coal business has generated
some semi-illegal subsidiary professions, such as the trade in
SIM cards in an area where both Indian and Bangladeshi
governments have banned the use of mobile phones. Many of the
older beneficiaries of the welfare and developmental state are
now in retreat; they wallow in nostalgia for the good times of
state-backed modernization and lament the new culture of greed
and selfishness, while entrepreneurs who walk a fine line
between criminality and legality flourish.

What does the creation of a new unsupervised social order
with its multiple actors portend for Bangladesh? Here, Hussain’s
answers are disconcertingly tentative. NGOs have not managed to
reduce poverty; they may even have helped the middle class more
than the poor and the marginalized. Short-term microfinancing by
local and international NGOs has replaced long-term issues of
infrastructure. According to Hussain, “there are no public
health facilities, sanitation or even electricity” in Borapani.
Residents who once had running water and even baths in the old
quarters of Khonighat have to make do with rainwater in its
abandoned limestone quarries.

There are other, less tangible losses in this brave new
world: Garment workers in Dhaka pleading for better work
conditions after an April factory collapse killed more than
1,000 people are asking for things that the employees of
Khonighat effortlessly possessed.

Hussain’s mood is not all bleak. He points to “creative
potentialities and possibilities” in the assertion of formerly
excluded communities. Noting their record of religious
tolerance, he hails the “disorganized cosmopolitanism” of
Borapani. But he seems aware, too, of simmering frustrations
among the “floating mass” of workers in unregulated zones.
Much of today’s social and religious violence in India, for
instance, is caused by the disempowering and degradation of men
employed, if at all, in the vast “informal sector.”

Above all, millions of South Asians suffer from a general
loss of national direction in an age when every man seems to be
out for himself. In Bangladesh, as in India and Pakistan, the
collapse of old nation-building projects of modernization has
deprived most citizens of the stories and images through which
they imagined themselves to be part of a larger whole.

For them, the disenchantment of the world feared by Max
Weber has happened even while they await, seemingly forever, the
next step into consoling prosperity and leisure. Meanwhile,
ethnic and religious sectarians stand ready to channel their
rage over being cheated. In that sense, Bangladesh, with its
already antique modernity, illuminates South Asia’s troubled
present as vividly as it does its past.

(Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire:
The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” and a
Bloomberg View columnist.)